Metacognitive Reflection and Insight Therapy (MERIT): Application to a Long-Term Therapy Case of Borderline Personality Disorder.

Impairments in metacognitive capacity-or the processes that enable individuals to access, understand, and integrate their ideas about their own and others' mental states-are a core barrier to recovery for many people with borderline personality disorder. Although therapeutic approaches that focus on metacognitive capacity are emerging, few deal with the concept of recovery at a foundational level. This article describes how a form of metacognitively oriented psychotherapy focused on recovery, metacognitive reflection and insight therapy (MERIT), assisted a patient with borderline personality disorder and initial metacognitive deficits to develop a complex understanding of himself and others and then to use that knowledge to act as an agent in the world and effectively respond to life challenges.

Negative symptoms in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia: A psychometric evaluation of the brief negative symptom scale across diagnostic categories.

Past studies have demonstrated that the Brief Negative Symptom Scale (BNSS) has excellent psychometric properties in patients with schizophrenia. In the current study, we extended this literature by examining psychometric properties of the BNSS in outpatients diagnosed with bipolar disorder (n=46), outpatients with schizophrenia (n=50), and healthy controls (n=27). Participants completed neuropsychological testing and a clinical interview designed to assess negative, positive, disorganized, mood, and general psychiatric symptoms.

Concurrent sound segregation impairments in schizophrenia: The contribution of auditory-specific and general cognitive factors.

The present study sought to test whether perceptual segregation of concurrently played sounds is impaired in schizophrenia (SZ), whether impairment in sound segregation predicts difficulties with a real-world speech-in-noise task, and whether auditory-specific or general cognitive processing accounts for sound segregation problems. Participants with SZ and healthy controls (HCs) performed a mistuned harmonic segregation task during recording of event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants also performed a brief speech-in-noise task.

Differential impairment of social cognition factors in bipolar disorder with and without psychotic features and schizophrenia.

While it is well-established that patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder exhibit deficits in social cognition, few studies have separately examined bipolar disorder with and without psychotic features. The current study addressed this gap by comparing patients with bipolar disorder with (BD+) and without (BD-) psychotic features, patients with schizophrenia (SZ), and healthy controls (NC) across social cognitive measures. Principal factor analysis on five social cognition tasks extracted a two-factor structure comprised of social/emotional processing and theory of mind.

Emotion perception abnormalities across sensory modalities in bipolar disorder with psychotic features and schizophrenia.

Emotion perception deficits are a well-established feature of schizophrenia (SZ). Individuals with SZ have difficulty labeling emotional stimuli across auditory, visual, and audio-visual modalities and also misattribute threat towards neutral stimuli. The relationship between a history of psychosis and similar abnormalities in bipolar disorder (BD) is less clear.

Differences in developmental changes in academic and social premorbid adjustment between males and females with schizophrenia.

The assessment of premorbid adjustment in schizophrenia has received considerable attention because of models suggesting that schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by abnormalities in functioning prior to onset of the disorder. Some studies suggest that premorbid adjustment is best viewed as a multidimensional construct where different areas of functioning might be differentially impacted by the illness and sex. The current study examined these matters using of Premorbid Adjustment Scale (PAS) in a sample of 421 individuals with schizophrenia.

Factor structure of the Comprehensive Trail Making Test in children and adolescents with brain dysfunction.

The Comprehensive Trail Making Test (CTMT) is a relatively new version of the Trail Making Test that has a number of appealing features, including a large normative sample that allows raw scores to be converted to standard T scores adjusted for age. Preliminary validity information suggests that CTMT scores are sensitive to brain injury and demonstrate expected correlations with other neuropsychological tests, although the evidence also suggests that the factor structure of the CTMT may differ in children with brain dysfunction in comparison to the standardization sample. The present study addresses this matter by conducting a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the CTMT in 382 children and adolescents.

Measures of learning, memory and processing speed accurately predict smoking status in short-term abstinent treatment-seeking alcohol-dependent individuals.

Aim: Chronic cigarette smoking appears to adversely affect several domains of neurocognition in those with alcohol use disorders (AUDs). The primary goal of this study was to identify which measures commonly used to assess neurocognition in AUDs accurately predict smoking status of individuals seeking treatment of alcohol dependence.

Methods: Treatment-seeking alcohol-dependent participants (ALC; n = 92) completed a comprehensive neuropsychological battery after 33 ± 9 days of abstinence.

Timing is everything: neural response dynamics during syllable processing and its relation to higher-order cognition in schizophrenia and healthy comparison subjects.

Successful linguistic processing requires efficient encoding of successively-occurring auditory input in a time-constrained manner, especially under noisy conditions. In this study we examined the early neural response dynamics to rapidly-presented successive syllables in schizophrenia participants and healthy comparison subjects, and investigated the effects of noise on these responses. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to reveal the time-course of stimulus-locked activity over bilateral auditory cortices during discrimination of syllable pairs that differed either in voice onset time (VOT) or place of articulation (POA), in the presence or absence of noise.

Neuropsychological substrates and everyday functioning implications of prospective memory impairment in schizophrenia.

Individuals with schizophrenia demonstrate impairment in prospective memory (ProM), which describes the multifaceted ability to execute a future intention. Despite its clear implications for everyday functioning, the neuropsychological substrates and functional correlates of ProM impairment in schizophrenia remain poorly understood. In this study, the Memory for Intentions Screening Test (MIST), a standardized measure of ProM, was administered to 72 outpatients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder as part of a comprehensive neuropsychological and psychiatric research evaluation.